This is an extract from "Politics, Reading and Knowledge about Language", the author's address to the 1991 annual conference of the National Association for the Teaching of English. It describes the moment in 1988 when Kenneth Baker, then Secretary of State for Education and Science, received the report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Teaching of English Language [the Kingman Report], which he had established. It failed to please him, because it did not recommend a return to old-fashioned grammar teaching based on a Latinate model of English, as he had hoped it would.